


A Vivid Blossom

by cable69



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-10
Updated: 2015-12-10
Packaged: 2018-05-05 22:09:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5392127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cable69/pseuds/cable69
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was one thing to stand near a man with laser blasts vaporizing rocks all around the two of you, and another to stand near a man facing each other in a quiet room, the sound of breath a vivid blossom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Vivid Blossom

**Author's Note:**

> I really wish I actually HAD SUMMARIES for all of these damn stories instead of having to come up with them
> 
> not that this was hard bc i just used the first paragraph
> 
> anyway
> 
> first posted on ff.net; unedited

It was one thing to stand near a man with laser blasts vaporizing rocks all around the two of you, and another to stand near a man facing each other in a quiet room, the sound of breath a vivid blossom.

He spends a lot of time laughing at things that aren’t very funny. Uhura’s alright now, going around kissing girls again, like everybody should, doesn’t give him those glares anymore, or worse, move her eyes past him like he’s a pillar or a button to not push. They greet each other in the salad line like teenagers. 

Spock was never not alright, on the outside. Spock never treated anybody different. 

He, though, he, Kirk, he’s still scorched.

When they were on Lupercalia and all those damn lasers were going off, Uhura forgave him over the comlink, a sweet light in his ear. Later he couldn’t find any trace of it over the channels. The woman was magic, writing waves like she was the universe itself, getting channels open where they hadn’t even existed before. He thought of all of the knowledge in the databases and streaming over the continuum, and her, a spider at the center of an invisible, roaring web. They moved on different frequencies, at times; they collided on Spock’s.

It was a dumb thing to do. It was Kirk, though, so nobody was too surprised. He regretted it a lot later, especially when he had to rearrange shifts and reconfigure away teams. That wasn’t true: he regretted it the most when she moved around him like he was a ghost.

On Lupercalia, there was a big, thick yellow flower with leaves like hawk’s tails, striped and spotted, and a thick fuzzy stem. It grew by the millions in the fields. The Lupercalians ate the flower’s bulbs. They gave a stew of it to Kirk when he was there. It tasted a little like mussels had always tasted to him: immediately awful, but if you focused, you could see slantwise what other people liked in it. 

In one valley, which was bounded by an old stone wall, the flowers didn’t bloom until a certain night, right after moonrise. The trees had been shuddering all night: the Lupercalians were close to war. Kirk wanted to see the blooming, so he dragged Spock out of his tent and across the fields, up around a stream and through a copse of trees. They sat at the lip of the valley, on the stone wall, and watched the moon rise, watched the flowers bloom.

In retrospect, sitting unarmed at the highest point on the no-man’s land between the bristling factions was not the smartest decision. Every single member of Starfleet that Kirk communicated with for the next month reminded him of this in no uncertain terms. Even though the bloom had been perfect and wonderful and enchanting and all that, and even though Spock had looked at him with those curiously rounded eyes and said words that didn’t exactly mean “I forgive you” but were close enough, it wasn’t worth nearly getting their heads blown off their necks by lasers.

But a few months after the Lupercalians had calmed themselves and stopped lobbing missiles at each other, when Kirk and Spock were playing chess in an aft room, Spock said, “The blossoming on Lupercalia was beautiful,” and fuck if it hadn’t hurt and been awful and he had been mean to Uhura and rude to Spock and dumb around dangerous lasers and deserved every ounce of pain he’d caused anybody, but he was wrong, he was so wrong, and he knew it, and it was worth it.


End file.
